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Published Sep 2019
416 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
A dazzling Don Quixote for the modern age - a tour de force that is as much an homage to an immortal work of literature as it is to the quest for love and family, by Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie.
Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television who falls in impossible love with a TV star. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where "Anything-Can-Happen." Meanwhile, his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own.
Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirize the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse. And with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of Rushdie's work, the fully realized lives of DuChamp and Quichotte intertwine in a profoundly human quest for love and a wickedly entertaining portrait of an age in which fact is so often indiscernible from fiction.
"Rushdie's uproarious comedy, which talks to itself while packing a good deal of historical and political freight, is a brilliant rendition of the cheesy, sleazy, scary pandemonium of life in modern times." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[A] meditation on storytelling, memory, truth, and other hallmarks of a disappearing civilization...Humane and humorous. Rushdie is in top form, serving up a fine piece of literary satire." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Rushdie's narrative impulses are centrifugal; they lie in tossing in celebrity cameos and literary allusions, in sending new plots into orbit in the hope they might lend glitter and ballast to a work sorely in need of both, sorely in need of tethering to the world, the concerted thinking and feeling of realism, not magic." - The New York Times
"While Quichotte is funny, it's rarely as funny as Rushdie thinks it is. Sometimes, it reads like the work of a man trying to have the final word on everything before the world ends. Or at least before he ends. Still, even if you feel overwhelmed, you can't help being charmed by Rushdie's largesse." - The Guardian
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1947. He studied in India and England, reading History at King's College, Cambridge. His first novel, Grimus, was published in 1975. His second novel, the critically acclaimed and award-winning Midnight's Children, was published in 1991. Among its honors, it was pronounced the 'Booker of the Bookers,' which recognized it as the best example of that illustrious prize. Malcolm Bradley in The Modern British Novel (1994) pronounced the book "a new start for the late-twentieth-century novel." Rushdie's next novel, Shame, also won critical acclaim and international awards. Famously, Rushdie's next book, The Satanic Verses, incurred an issuance of a fatwa – a call for his death – by the orthodox leadership in Iran. Rushdie went into ...
... Full Biography
Link to Salman Rushdie's Website
Name Pronunciation
Salman Rushdie: sal-MARN RUSH-dee
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